


Past Resurrection

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M, Ontological status of medial consonants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-25 23:36:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6214678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'It got to a point where I threw up my job and spent a couple of months looking for something ashore. By the end of that time we both knew it would never work anyway.'</p><p>Actually, they sort of knew from the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Past Resurrection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).



> To toujours_nigel's prompt 'Alec Deacon and Ralph Lanyon, things you said when you were drunk, things you said at 3am.' Only mildly stocious, in the first case.

‘No thanks,’ Alec said, ‘I shan’t be able to read your thing if I do. I hate having to concentrate when I’m tight, that sort of half-elated swimming feeling.’

Ralph raised an eyebrow. ‘You won’t be, will you? And it’s not exactly―who’s your wordy Yank?’ 

‘Henry James?’ 

‘That’s him. Realise you haven’t quite caught the drift, look for the beginning of the sentence and it’s half-a-dozen pages back.’ 

‘You liked _The Turn of the Screw_.’ 

‘I always like your presents,’ Ralph said mildly. Alec supposed it had been one of his more pointed ones. Ralph raised his hand in unobtrusive benediction and a waiter materialised instantly. ‘Two more brandies, please.’ 

They should have gone to the grill room in the Hakluyt, Alec thought. They could have had their customary argument about pronunciation, though that had turned surprisingly vituperative last time: Alec maintaining that a rhyme with ‘cruet’ was necessary if one were to be understood, and besides, it was a small and simple courtesy for a customer to say the name of an establishment as those serving him did; Ralph insisting that standards should be upheld, they would only despise you for trying to ingratiate yourself; Alec asking, incredulous and rhetorical, exactly who he thought he meant, in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, by _they_? Ralph had looked down at his chop, potatoes and peas, and murmured, ‘You’re quite right, of course. It’s just it wasn't often a courtesy paid me, you understand.’ 

The associative memory of staring over Ralph's shoulder at a hideous marquetry panel of the eponymous divine in his ruff and cassock for the long, ghastly half-minute it had taken to catch on to the continued implication of 'customer' was probably the reason why Alec had rejected the Hakluyt in favour of this dim attempt to import a gingham-tableclothed Chelsea raffishness to to Bridstow. With Peter, Theo and their friend Rollo it had been charming; with Ralph it seemed both subfusc and affected, turning his generosity into an appalling shore-leave largesse. 

‘I haven’t been totting up, of course,’ Alec said with conscious candour, ‘but I’m pretty sure with that last one I haven’t enough on me to split the bill.’ 

‘Don’t be a clot. I’m treating you.’ His brisk tone was curiously at variance with a cloudy, vague smile. ‘That’s understood.’ 

‘Is it? Because you didn’t actually ask me.’ How absurd human psychology was, he thought: in perversely standing on a point of honour he did not feel, he had brought the feeling into being. 

‘ _Alec._ Don’t you think you’re rather manufacturing it?’ 

His start at the coincidence kindled sudden, ferocious desire: when their thoughts happened to meet, it always made him want their bodies to as well. But that would have to wait not just for privacy but for Ralph’s more deliberate responses; the dreadful thing was, he knew it would be worth it. 

* 

Stricken, Alec gripped the tumbler that he’d rested (perilously, since it represented Ralph's whole stock of glassware) on the chair-arm. ‘I say, think I’ve read too far.’ 

Ralph, sitting slumped with one hand in his pocket, the other behind his head, said languidly, ‘You can’t have. I hadn’t even thought to get up and pace yet.’ 

‘I can, you know. Eleven hundred words a minute. Fellow at the hospital was studying the effects of certain stimulants on mental processes. I did warn him that this subject―in common with most of his kind―very rarely has zero levels, but he still seemed interested. But anyway, look, did you mean me to read the bit about the swimmer, or just up to― _sank into the sea, the bauble of a luckless king―_ ’ 

‘―the sunset viewed from Hunstanton beach, yes.’ 

‘Sorry.’ Alec stubbed his cigarette, grimacing. ‘It reads on very smoothly from there―’ 

‘It’s all right. Nothing to _hide_. You know everything there is to. I just don’t want to bore you with it.’ But the sleepy look had gone, and Ralph's appealingly disproportionate features were sharp in the electric light. ‘What did you think of it, otherwise?’ 

‘It’s―impressionistic. Sort of meditative. Ugh. No. Scratch that. What I mean is the other stuff of yours I’ve read is about the places you’ve been to. But this is about you.’ 

‘Mm. I was afraid of that.’ He reached for the toothmug and drained it of a finger and a half of whisky. ‘I suppose I was feeling homesick. Nothing unusual in that, of course. When one’s away England is an orchard in July with a companion one doesn’t have to talk to, or a cathedral garth at midwinter in absolute silence and untrodden snow. And then you come back and it’s all greasy streets, Whifflets adverts, damp coats on buses and the wireless shrieking from every corner. Except this time, I welcomed it all the same. And I started thinking―’ he conscientiously met Alec’s eye with pained, necessitous pride, ‘I might look for work ashore.’ 

Alec felt as if the skin had been torn from his face, leaving him with the tragically resigned expression of an illustration in Vesalius. A remote part of his mind listed the facial muscles― _zygomatic min., zygomatic maj., risorius_ ―until he could speak again. 

Ralph extended his hand for the journal, one of the half-dozen Alec had bought for him in a poky stationer's on the Rue de l’Ancienne Comedie. ‘Never mind. It was just a thought.’ 

‘No―it would be delightful to see more of you,’ Alec exclaimed. He wished he’d managed to sound a little less like an Edwardian stockbroker’s daughter rejecting a proposal from her cousin under a potted palm, but at least he’d said something. ‘It’s just difficult to disconnect you from the sea, somehow. Are you sure it’s what you’d like?’ This, he told himself, was a real concern; it had just not been his first and greatest one, which was Ralph being insupportably _there_ all the time, doing things for him, without consultation and more efficiently than he would for himself. 

‘No, not altogether. It’s just this wretched run that’s driving me dotty, perhaps. A lot of Atlantic bugger-all with Quebec City waiting for you at the end of it. Again.’ 

Alec nodded. ‘Come to bed, won’t you?’ He offered a casual hand to pull him up, as boys at play do, wondering how Ralph managed, especially when he was tight, to get so extraordinarily _ensconced_ in a place. 

* 

‘Are you thinking about me?’ 

The question had assumed ritual status, preserving Ralph’s dignity with the fiction that he was merely vain, and stopping Alec from falling asleep. 

‘Yes.’ He always made him wait; that was part of it. Ralph sat against the headboard, hugging his knees. Alec lay on his side, propping his head on his hand. It was important that they should not touch. 

‘Go on.’ 

‘You should let me fuck you more often, since you seem to like it so much.’ 

Ralph’s whole body tensed. The livid glow from the thinly-curtained attic window, moonlight mingling with the smoky diffusions of street-lamps, turned his slim frame into a Cubist arrangement of bold angles and deep, unreal shadow. 

‘It’s not a reflection on virility. Just a personal preference,’ Alec added. ‘No more significant than the way you like your eggs.’ 

‘I know it’s bloody not. That’s not the reason―’ 

‘―and I run the opposite way to just about the same extent, so―’ 

‘There’s a bit more to it than that, don’t you think? Taking the other person out of himself, or something. Oh hell, I don’t know. Perhaps you don’t feel the need.’ 

Alec thought he might be right, he didn’t. But that was probably the wrong answer, so he nodded slowly. ‘All the same, my dear, no point in squandering compatibility―’ 

‘―in the one aspect we’ve actually got it, you mean?’ Ralph smiled, and if it was not one of his queer, inviting ones, then the mottled light made it seem so. No-one but Ralph could accommodate such a large component of pitilessness in his self-pity, Alec thought, or perhaps it was the other way about. Ralph stretched, wriggled down the bed with a curious exhalation, half-satisfaction, half-mirth, and claimed him with a kiss. In the end, Alec got about two hours shattered sleep, leaving as the streets started to rattle to bakers’ vans and milk floats. 

The next time they met, Ralph announced he’d handed in his notice, and Alec was surprised to find he did not have to feign pleasure at the news. And from that moment they both knew for certain it was all up.

**Author's Note:**

> Hakluyt: intrigued by the claim made by an Antonia Forest character that 'Hackloy, the best people call him, not Hacklooit,' I did a straw poll of the best people, and found that none of them call him 'Hackloy', anyway. I suspect 'Hackloy' or 'Hackloyt' might be an overcorrection resulting from the (almost certainly erroneous) belief that Hakluyt's ancestors were Dutch. For some reason I think it's an overcorrection that Ralph might go for.
> 
> Hunstanton faces west over the Wash, so despite its being on the east coast of England, you can see the sun set over the sea. Ralph's memoir alludes to King John's loss of the Crown Jewels in the Wash, subject of innumerable schoolboy jokes.


End file.
